When dealing with transactional data often there are many levels of granularity lying within. Finding these granularities exposes how your data is shaped as it accumulates and helps paint a better picture of what I like to call Lifes within the data. In this post, I want to share a technique I use to find data patterns which will be beneficial for everyone from the analyst to the architect.

Why do I refer to these data patterns as Lifes?

I haven’t found anything transactional in nature that doesn’t have some sort of recurring theme, with a distinct beginning and end, that couldn’t tell a story. It is these finite beginning/ends, start/stops, on/offs that paint the picture that is the “life” of the data. The life of these stories often have many sub-narratives and are interwoven within a single holistic life of the data. A great example is the familiar case of a customer purchase history. The customer is the holistic life of the data, their purchase orders, individual line items, and even a particular line item purchased over several purchase orders are all examples of sub-narratives within the story of a single customer.

For my Business Objects (BOBJ) SAP Data Services (BODS) folks out there, this post will indeed be helpful at some point during your exposure to the ETL tool. You’ll eventually find yourself digging through the Data Services repository trying to locate details about your jobs, reports, or anything that makes your dynamic processing easier. There are loads of forum posts on the subject and even a few nice posts that attempt to make sense of what the schema has to offer. But, there’s one thing that I couldn’t find and am sharing with you today: How to find BODS Workflow to Dataflow to Target Metadata for your target tables within BODS.

BODS Workflow to Dataflow to Target Metadata Repository

In my case, I needed to retrieve the number of rows inserted/discarded/deleted/updated for all target tables within all dataflows within a particular workflow. Since my job routine is divided into workflows, I didn’t need to take the granularity any farther but is certainly possible. Still, in my case, I had the need to retrieve metadata about what my workflow just did with having many dataflows within it all running in parallel. This parallelism introduced the need to dynamically pull these statistics from the repository rather than after each dataflow execution.

Let’s take a look at the query:

The topic of dynamic dimension descriptions isn’t new, but the method for which I’ve come up with is a hybrid of several other methodologies, making for a great subject piece. Using codes and descriptions in your warehouse dimensions is standard practice, even in some cases the use-case may require displaying a code versus a description, for example: displaying USA instead of United States of America, or even in situations where the business understands what a “TPS” report type is more so than the formal “Testing Procedure Specification” description. In any case, you’ll want a method that enables the ability to add and modify additional codes and their descriptions without having to perform risky manual updates to the warehouse.

In this post, I will discuss a rigid yet tolerant way for properly implementing dynamic dimension descriptions without ever directly modifying a warehouse dimensional table. Instead, we’ll implement a lookup table that an end user can insert and update freely, along with a robust ETL process that uses this same lookup table to perform description updates and even type 2 historical tracking, if necessary.

Just for fun: Let’s look at some interesting ways to solve a multi-column pivot or unpivot (aka crosstab). Some methods are not ANSI standard and others simply won’t work on certain RDBMSs, but we’ll play around with some methods that I came up with using SQL Server 2016.

Let’s start by creating us some data!

One of my favorite uses of set-data manipulation involves using NULL values to my advantage; from NULLIF to COALESCE, we’ll explore some creative use of null values. These tips & tricks aren’t just a way to convert a NULL to another value, they’re a multi-purpose, insanely powerful way to massage and combine data.

NULL Galaxy – Creative use of null values

Level Set: What is a NULL?

In SQL a NULL value isn’t a value at all – it’s lack of value. It’s a value that is indicative of not having a value. Think of it as if you asked someone a question but they didn’t respond, their response was a NULL value. So, therefore you cannot compare someone’s non-response to someone else’s non-response, while they seem like the same answer they’re likely not even the same question!

Null logical comparison

PgSQL

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SELECTNULLWHERENULL=NULL;

VS

SELECTNULLWHERENULLISNULL;

There are some exceptions to this rule (thanks, Microsoft) but, like most of my blog posts, I try to stick with ANSI standard rules. While some RDBMSs treat NULL differently and even have switches that can be set during runtime to alter how NULL logic works, we’re not going to go there. Just assume ANSI 99.

I’ve since evolved a little since I posted this and would like to hone my focus of this post to a clearer target: Look For Ridiculous instead.

This is my hands-down, go-to interview question to weed out non-technical candidates. I have had such great success with this interview question and have shared it with other colleagues who have experienced equal success that I think it deserves a place on this blog. I’ve talked about this before, a little over a year ago is when I made my first public announcement of my new-found favorite interview question:

How do you open notepad on windows?

I typically preface the question with a short disclaimer like, “This question is a bit unorthodox and there really isn’t a wrong answer, having more than one answer is also equally acceptable…” This sets the stage for the actual question which I’ll phrase like “On a windows machine, regardless of version specifics, how do YOU open windows notepad?”

Just the other day I was asked to help a peer solve an SQL problem they were having; they were trying to count within a case statement which was proving to be problematic. They had several columns within the query, most using an analytical function to find the sum, min or max of various fields – but there was one instance where she needed to count the number of occurrences of a situation, a situation that required several other fields to determine, and without adding those other fields to the GROUP BY would break the logic.

Like a ninja, count within a case statement.

How to count within a case statement?

One of my favorite interview questions is to hand the candidate a marker and ask them to write out how to find all duplicates in a table. This should be straightforward and weeds out anyone who struggles with SQL; and even if they don’t struggle with SQL, this will be a good way to gauge where they’re at. But, it doesn’t stop there!

I’ve since evolved a little since I posted this and would like to hone my focus of this post to a clearer target: Look For Ridiculous instead.

After they successfully give an answer, typically one involving grouping by the business key having a count greater than one, which I’ll show in the first example below, that is a go-to correct response to this question. But, I throw them a curve ball, I’ll say “Great! Show me another way.” Then, I ask for another, and another, and another… with great power comes great responsibility being the interviewer is nefariously fun!

How to find all duplicates in a table.

So, let’s take a look at some ways on how to find all duplicates in a table by exploring all the ways that I’ve come up with. Here’s our test data we’ll be working with, which has 2 sets of duplicates:

The goal is to learn how to find all the duplicates in a table and return only 2 rows of data, ie: that have more than one identical row, even though there are 5 rows of duplicates (three dupes of one row and two of another).